Saturday, 30 July 2011

Rough recycling ... ...

I've been doing a spot of recycling, all be it very roughly, well it's more of a trying to find a use for all the things I've kept exercise ;-)

The first thing is some where to put my scroll saw, so far I've used it on the floor, on the kitchen table (wife not best pleased about that one) and various other places, none of which are very good places to use a scroll saw.

So I recycled my old metal computer desk into a table for my scroll saw, I even kept the wheels on it for extra mobility, and as it used to be a desk it's about the right height already.

Here it is -

Not much to look at.

I didn't really have to do that much to be honest, basically I just switched the frame work about, the sides of what was the desk were placed on what would have been the front and back of the desk, I had to drill new bolt holes, and add an extra bit of support at the back, again using a piece of the old desk.

Back support -

Drilling new bolt holes was easy.

I did originally intend to just bolt the saw to the new table, but found when using the saw at high speeds things were a little less than stable, so I added a wooden top for a little less wobble, it works well and means I can now sit at a good height and cut stuff out of wood, which is handy as I'm planning to make a dolls house for my daughter and I'll need to do a lot of cutting out for things like windows and such like.

Wooden top -

Not very neat, but it works.

I even kept the bottom shelf, figuring this would be handy for storing stuff on.

The next little bit of recycling involves 2 hoovers (yes 2)

This is very much a hack, and had I spent more time I would have made something a little neater, basically I do a lot of wood turning and other very dusty related stuff in my shed and I decided I needed some kind of dust removal system.

I did have an old hoover which I used for cleaning up and clearing dust, but it was old and more or less knackered when I started using it in the shed, needless to say it didn't last very long, and until our last hoover broke it just sat in the shed waiting to be used for something.

Dust extraction systems can be quite pricey, so I figured building my own was the best way to go, all I really needed was a new motor to power the extractor, and as luck would have it we got a new hoover and so I kept the broken one, which wasn't usable in the house any more, but was perfect for what I wanted.

Here's the extractor set up (warning contains extreme hackiness) -

Okay so I've basically hacked 2 hoovers together ;-)

The old hoover was a tub type effort, so I've kept the tub part and removed the motor and it's housing, then I basically made a lid for it that I could fix the hose from the other hoover to.

It looks rough (and it is) but it does the job, basically I'm using the tub as a storage bin for wood shavings and such like, and the other hoover is a replacement for the old motor, it works well because unlike the old hoover this still has some of it's filters intact so the motor doesn't get dusty and burn out like the last time (oops)

How it works is simple enough, hoover A provides suction and hoover B provides a storage bin, wood shavings get sucked into the bin and any fine dust is filtered out by hoover A's filters.

The storage bin -

The tub holds a fair bit of waste.

When it's full I bag up the shavings and I intend to use it as mulch on the garden and down the allotment, I've also discovered that the filter collects very fine wood dust, which when mixed with some pva makes for a pretty good wood filler :-)

The fine dust -

Very fine and great for making wood filler.

I've also found out that I can connect the extractor up to all my power tools, or at least the ones that have dust outlets on them, which may come in handy if I need to use them in the house.

You could also make a wooden box to do the same thing, you'd just need to make it so that you could connect your hoover to it, and it would need to be sealed as well, with some kind of removable lid for emptying it, which is what I would have done if I'd had a little more time.

And there you have it, even if something doesn't have an immediate use anymore (like an old pc desk) it may well have a use in the future, so it's worth hanging on to it for a short while.